About Me

Buford C. Terrell
Controlled substances laws and their consequences have been the center of my professional life for over fifteen years. I host a public interest television program in Houston, “Drugs, Crime, and Politics” , produced by the Drug Policy forum of Texas, and have done so for most of its ten-year history. Before my retirement, I taught a seminar, “Controlled Substances Law” for many years at South Texas College of Law.
In this blog I intend to explore the features and consequences of those laws, especially the unintended consequences, and look at the need for, and possibility of, changing them. Don’t expect a lot of breaking news or current events, although there will be some. My approach will be more historical and theoretical. I hope to get a lot of criticism – good, bad, and otherwise – and to start some good, heated discussions.

Thursday, February 28, 2013

Sequestration Speculations

Sequestration
Speculations

Sequestration
of a substantial portion of Federal spending, uniformly across all agencies, is
set to begin March 1.These impending
cuts prompt the question of what effect they will have on the War on Drugs.

These
cuts add up to about $85 billion for the remainder of this year and apply (with
some exceptions) proportionately to all federal agencies.They will amount to almost five per cent of
all expenditures.The list of Drug War
agencies affected is amazingly long.

They
include the DEA, FBI, and Bureau of Prisons.The Border Patrol, a branch of ICE, is heavily involved.The National Institutes for Drug Abuse and
Mental Health are also affected, as may be some of the CDC’s data collection
and research.US attorneys’ offices
spend much of their time preparing and trying over 14,000 criminal cases a
year, about half of them drug-related; and the courts must hear those
cases.The Coast Guard diverts many of
its resources to the attempted interdiction of drug smugglers.Even the Department of Education must screen
some aid recipients for drug convictions and public housing agencies screen
against drug users.This list, while
long and extensive, is not complete.The
Drug War has become so pervasive that few government branches are not affected.

The
cuts will vary from agency to agency.Drug War-related activities are a minor part of what the CDC does.Across the board cuts there will have little
effect on drug-related activities and, if the drug-related costs were shifted
to easy burdens elsewhere in the agency, their gain would be minimal.On the other hand, confinement of those
convicted of drug crimes is a major part of the Bureau of Prison’s costs –
between one-third and one-half of federal convicts are there because of drug
crimes.Much of BOP’s costs are irreducible,
going for security, meals, medical costs, housing and clothing.The determinate sentencing laws limit their
ability to release non-violent prisoners early.BOP will be hard-pressed to cut five percent.

The
Coast Guard’s path is easier to predict.Drug interdiction is far down the list of its priorities.Interdiction resources can easily be shifted
to more urgently activities like search and rescue.

At
first glance, the Border Patrol looks much like the Coast Guard.It has multiple tasks: preventing illegal
entries, blocking contraband and arresting smugglers, stopping terrorists; so
it should be able to prioritize those tasks.However, the differences between the agencies probably prevent
this.The BP uses the same techniques for
all of these tasks.It conducts
inspections at entry points and patrols the rest of the border to intercept
intruders.However, the BP could make a
procedural change that would create large savings.At inspection points, identifying legal
entrants is straight forward and takes little time.Searches for contraband are time and resource
consuming and create major delays.Simply
stopping suspicionless drug searches of those legally crossing the border would
save a significant amount of agent labors, leading to large savings.

The
courts have to take the cases brought to them.At first glance, all they can do is add to their dockets and let trial
delays pile up.Determinate sentencing
laws limit their flexibility on plea bargains.However, they do have some indirect discretion; the can pressure U. S.
attorneys to file fewer criminal cases.But about twenty years ago, they pressed that power almost to the limits
when they “encouraged” the USAs to allow minor drug cases to be tried in state
courts.That sponge may already have
been squeezed dry.

The
Department of Justice could be the game changer.In addition to containing the DEA, FBA, and
BOP, it supervises the U. S. attorneys.The FBI and DEA function mainly through field agents.If their budgets are cut, the main effect
will be to reduce the number of active agents.Either fewer cases will be investigated or complex cases will be ignored
in favor of simpler ones requiring less agent involvement.Less money may be available for paid
informants, which would put a major crimp in investigations.

U.
S. attorneys may be pressed to put less effort into major news-worthy cases,
including those against large medical dispensaries in California, and more
effort into simple prosecutions that can be resolved quickly with guilty pleas.

Sequestration
may have its greatest effect on the Justice Department at the policy
level.For four years, it has been
trying to deal with medical marijuana in several states, choosing to ignore
patients and small, obscure suppliers.Now it is also faced with legalized marijuana possession in Colorado and
Washington.These laws have been in effect
for three months now, but all Attorney General Holder has done is to say that a
policy announcement will be issued soon.Budget cuts suggest that any kind of heightened enforcement is
unlikely.Sequestration may force the
acceptance of these new laws as faits
accompli, and thus encourage other states to join the bandwagon.

These
speculations suggest that the forced budget cuts will not lead to dramatic changes
in the Drug War. But some quiet changes may weaken the over-all strategy.Less effort may be put into drug
interdiction, leading to lower prices and higher purity for cocaine ad may
encourage some Andean producers to bypass the Mexican cartels and resume direct
importation.The Administration may be
forced to grudgingly be more accommodating to state efforts both for medical marijuana
and legalization.In short, the result
will probably be a slight acceleration in trends already in progress.

Like
most speculations, these are probably wrong.Soon the real world will expose their shortcomings.